Meltem Demirors is Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, a digital asset investment firm that manages $4B in assets on behalf of a global client base, and serves as a trusted partner to investors and entrepreneurs navigating the digital asset ecosystem.

An established veteran of digital asset investing, Meltem draws on her substantial experience and widespread influence to accelerate growth and acceptance of the asset class. Prior to joining CoinShares, Meltem helped build and grow Digital Currency Group, raising capital from the world’s largest corporations and managing a portfolio of 120 companies and 4 subsidiaries. Before she was bitten by the bitcoin bug, Meltem worked in the Oil & Gas industry in trading, corporate treasury, and M&A roles.

Meltem has been recognized for her personal contributions to the industry and serves as an outspoken advocate. She is a founding member and co-chair of the World Economic Forum Cryptocurrency Council and testified before the House Financial Services Committee on the importance of bitcoin. 

Meltem teaches at her alma mater MIT as well as Oxford, and is passionate about privacy and civil rights.

Zavain is driven by smart software, leveraging data and machine intelligence to scale, augment, and balance human intelligence. He invests in companies that are using machine learning and AI to augment or replace physical-world functions including biology, language, manufacturing and analysis. He looks for entrepreneurs that can use software and data to hone a philosophical position on where the world is, and how to direct it for the better.

Zavain has led Lux's investments in Primer, a machine intelligence startup; Clarifai, which democratizes cutting edge deep neural networks; Auransa, which is developing novel medicines based on computational insight applied to genomic data; Recursion which uses automation and deep learning to develop drugs for rare diseases; Tempo Automation, which applies software and automation to electronics manufacturing; Rigetti Computing, which is fabricating some of the fastest quantum chips in the world; Visla, which is bringing AI to medical diagnostics; Visor, which aims to simplify tax preparation; Computable Labs, which is building a decentralized data marketplace; Blockstack, which builds architectures to decentralize current winner-take-all centralized web components; and Runway, which is putting machine learning tools into the hands of creators.

Previously Zavain was an investor at Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors. There he sourced and led the firm's investments in early stage technology companies including Zymergen and BlockStream. Zavain drafted the firm's theses in Genetics, Synthetic Biology, and the Blockchain.

Prior to VC, Zavain was a founder and computer scientist. At Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter), he engineered machine learning and AI systems across a proprietary distributed computing framework to build web scale-ranking algorithms. Zavain was also a cofounder of Fountainhop, one of the first hyper-local social networks.

Zavain holds a BS in symbolic systems and an MS in computer science from Stanford where he was a researcher in Stanford's AI Lab. He is currently a Lecturer at Stanford and has taught quarter long
seminars in Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy, and Venture Capital. Current course notes can be found here.

Rodolfo is fascinated by financial disintermediation, peer-to-peer funding, and bringing transparency and simplicity to the consumer experience. As a kid, he wanted to be a professional soccer player or movie actor; but he grew into an adult with a passion for promoting economic growth and inclusion through innovation in financial services.

When Rodolfo was 17, he co-founded his first startup, Mexplosion, to host the Mexican qualifiers for the World Cyber Games e-gaming competition in 2001. His second and more recent entrepreneurial venture was a crowdfunding platform for social enterprises called YouVest.

Rodolfo has an MBA from MIT Sloan's School of Management, with concentrations in finance and entrepreneurship, and degrees in Marketing from ITESM and International Relations from UNAM Mexico.

Rodolfo geeks out on movies, philosophy, history, travel and coffee. He is an avid traveler, and has lived in Mexico City, North Carolina, Orlando, Melbourne (Australia), Boston, Nairobi, and Bangkok. He is now based in San Francisco, where he is on a quest to find the best espresso in the city.